UBS Whistleblower: HSBC, UBS, JPMorgan, and Others Run a “Criminal Industry”

Stephanie Gibaud, former Chief of Protocol at Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in France is collaborating with Argentina’s federal tax agency, AFIP, to reveal the name of hundreds of Argentines who held unregistered accounts in UBS, just as did 4,040 more in Dope, Inc.’s HSBC, as part of a vast tax-evasion and capital-flight scheme directed against the Argentine government.

In an exclusive interview published Tuesday in Tiempo Argentino, Gibaud warned that “hundreds” of banks do exactly what HSBC did, facilitating the setting up of thousands of unregistered accounts. “It’s a dirty business,” she said. “We have to understand that we are dealing with a criminal industry.”

Gibaud works with HSBC whistleblower Herve Falciani, whose information on that bank’s illegal operations was the basis for the recent Swiss Leaks revelations.

What HSBC did “is a copy/paste of what I experienced at UBS,” Gibaud told the Argentine daily.

“The opacity is what allows these banks to work with ‘unacceptable’ clients and turn them into highly profitable ones.”

Setting up unregistered accounts in banks like HSBC, UBS, and JPMorgan, to name a few, is highly profitable, she emphasized.

“Hundreds of banks have done the same—there are many more illegal accounts,” many Argentines among them, she said. “You have to understand that this is the primary business of offshore banking.”

Gibaud explained that in 2008, she began to smell a rat after UBS told her to destroy the contents of her computer’s hard drive and all of her files, which included names of clients and their managers in France, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Belgium, and Monaco. She also became familiar with the case of Bradley Birkenfeld, an employee of UBS in the U.S. who has also exposed the bank’s illegal operations.

Efforts by top bank executives to blame or scapegoat lower-level employees for illegal acts, is “disgusting,” Gibaud told Tiempo Argentino. These executives “are the ones behind the banks’ strategies. They are the heavyweights.” There is only one place for them, she said: “jail.”